Canonical Tag

[kflanagan28]

Hey

Anyone start using this. I have a client site that I am hoping to implement this on as there CMS creates tonnes of duplicate URLs. I have tried using robots.txt to overcome this but it's simply to big of a problem.

Interested to get other peoples thoughts ...

 

[ericstan]

I would choose robots.txt rather than a new, tag supported for God knows how long and how will know
Why you say is too complicated to use robots.txt? Should do the trick, combined with nofollow and noindex

 

[Alhazred De Sane]

Hey

Anyone start using this. I have a client site that I am hoping to implement this on as there CMS creates tonnes of duplicate URLs. I have tried using robots.txt to overcome this but it's simply to big of a problem.

Interested to get other peoples thoughts ...

Haven't used it yet, but the next E-Commerce site we put together will more than likely use this tag. I see Ask has now joined Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, so it looks like it will be around for a while. In the past I've used redirects and the xml sitemap, for Google, to deal with duplicate issues.

 

[thomas09]

Hi,

I have not yet used it because I'm not working on such kind of sites and there isn't issue about duplicate urls. well, it would be interesting know if someone has tried it

__________________
Sam Thomas
Hubshout. com

 

[RedCardinal]

I would choose robots.txt rather than a new, tag supported for God knows how long and how will know
Why you say is too complicated to use robots.txt? Should do the trick, combined with nofollow and noindex

Curious about your comment. What I think many people dont realise is that the 4 things you mention - nofollow, noindex, robots and the new rel="canonical" - all do different things.

Not suggesting anything about you personally, but I find that so many people just don't understand what each of those features does, and the impact on Pagerank and Indexation.

IMO robots.txt is the bluntest tool available. Easiest to use, but also the least useful.

 

[kflanagan28]

I couldn't use robots.txt to do the same thing as it wouldn't have the same effect as per comments above.

Again with nofollow I don't see how you would get the same effect. Unless I suppose if you had

www.example.com/pageone

and all dynamic links beyond this page that offered near or duplicate content

www.example.com/pageone?id=321

were nofollowed ensuring PR didn't pass to these. But that still doesn't cover the point if these dynamic pages obtain external links, the PR won't flow back to the master page.

Thats a rough example but the canonical tag is more like a 301 redirect but it's only used by search engines so the user isn't redirected.

This kind of feature is hard to mimic with robots.txt and nofollow.

I think its a god send for large CMS driven sites ...